The Longer Read
Spaceships over Doncaster: The truth about UFOs – and how believers may be wired differently
Scientists, doctors, intelligence officials and ordinary Britons are increasingly willing to discuss experiences once dismissed as fantasy. Do UFO believers have ‘specially configured’ minds, delusions or are they simply ahead of the curve? Jonathan Margolis reports
Sunday 17 May 2026 06:00 BST
This week’s first post-election meeting of the city council in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, should rank as one of 2026’s standout weird moments. While those attending might have been under the impression they were there to discuss bins and parking controls, newly elected Reform councillor, 18-year-old Kieran Lay, took it upon himself to propose a “Doncaster UAP Overview and Safety Committee to track unidentified anomalous phenomena”, better known as UFOs. It was telling that his fellow Reformers in the council chamber appeared quite matter-of-fact about the idea of Doncaster having its own X-Files. With President Trump having now ordered the release of all America’s secret files on UFOs, the belief in them is now becoming practically mainstream.
Some way from Doncaster, in the US Capitol, Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett, a 61-year-old Republican who has access to classified briefings, said the first cache of released UFO-related documents was “a drop in the bucket”. What’s coming next, he said, is going to be “holy crap”. The first file release last week was indeed rather meh, but there’s a tsunami of other supposed UFO revelations, whether the Pentagon files give us the definitive answer to their existence or not.
Japan announced this week that it will release its secret UFO data. Ukraine said it was tracking UFOs. Earlier this year, President Obama said UFOs “are real”, although he later clarified his response, saying that he meant there was intelligent life somewhere in the universe. Ditto secretary of state Marco Rubio, who, in a documentary, confirmed there have been mysterious aircraft that “aren’t ours” buzzing places like nuclear sites – before later heavily qualifying what he’d said.
UFO “experiencers” of surprisingly high calibre have testified before Congressional committees, such that there is now a core of 25 or so Congressmen around Burchett also saying classified material that would shock the world. There’s also a book and documentary coming imminently from Jay Stratton, a retired intelligence officer from the Pentagon’s UAP task force and the most senior government official to go public on UFOs and non-human intelligence.
Next month will see the launch of Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s first UFO film since ET in 1982 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. The film is a conspiracy thriller starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, and Colin Firth.
All this UFO noise is intriguing and entertaining for most of us. But it is serious business for the tiny but significant proportion of people who claim to have seen UFOs. In many cases, they have reported bodily harm and psychological trauma caused by them, but have mostly been widely disbelieved, ridiculed and marginalised. Congressman Burchett says that UFO witnesses in the US military are pulled off duty and subjected to psychiatric evaluation.
If UFOs are ever officially validated, will they see it as vindication, or become bitter – and litigious - about all the time they were disbelieved, ridiculed and often shamed? If it’s a hard “no” from the declassified Pentagon files, will they feel further marginalised or shrug it off as typical? John Priestland, an Oxford physics graduate who is now running a construction industry consultancy in London’s Berkeley Square, is an unlikely champion for UFO experiencers. He lives in Surrey and is a pretty regular chap; public school educated, fast-tracked to the civil service after Oxford and is a member of the Reform Club.
But what really fascinates him and prompted him three years ago to set up a foundation called Unhidden, is the “pain and bewilderment” suffered by UFO believers when we laugh at their experiences, and also the ontological shock that society would suffer if official confirmation of UFOs ever landed. Priestland first became intellectually interested in the number of UFO sightings around nuclear installations. “I just wanted to talk about that with fellow scientists and I’d say, ‘It's a bit strange. What do you reckon?’ And nobody would talk to me about it. It was like, John, you’ve gone a bit strange with the conspiracy theory.’” “If I’d said ‘Is there an outer planet beyond Pluto?’ or ‘Could this be a new type of butterfly?’ That's fine. But, ‘Is there a correlation between UAP sightings and nuclear sites?’, you get this sudden concern for your mental health.”
I subsequently spent more time talking with two UK experiencers with whom Unhidden is in touch; meeting some of the professionals who work with the foundation, and have contributed to a societal preparedness plan they are publishing next month.
David Pearce is a cybersecurity engineer in his early fifties, currently part of the South Wales ambulance service. While working on a computer in the library of Cardiff High School in 2005, he spotted “a massive metallic cylinder” break through the clouds and rotate silently, with the light glinting off it. “It kind of levelled out and then leaned over to the right, still rotating, and just disappeared back into the clouds like it was never there. There was no thrust. It was like a cork bobbing on water; it had that buoyancy about it. I had a sense of fear I had never felt before, nor since. It just looked, for all intents and purposes, I’m sorry to say the word: alien.” Pearce had a similar experience when he was 10 and was out playing football with his mate, Wayne, who to this day, Pearce says, won’t speak about it. “I was at my Auntie Sylvie's house, and saw three lights in a triangular formation, and they were just rotating around each other. My brother’s had his own experiences. My father and my mother have seen things. My grandfather, who was a coal miner, had three sightings.”
“I know, I know,” David Pearce concluded. “You can practically hear people’s eyes rolling. I’m sorry, but I am not gullible. I’ve got a scientific background. I know my physics. All I know is that strange things have happened, and I haven’t a clue how to explain them.”
Jonathan Davies, a 58-year-old businessman in Monmouthshire, is another experiencer who has been seeing strange things most of his life, including “a landing experience” on the Gower peninsula. In Davies’ case, he has become almost part of the UFO establishment, running various online UFO groups and staying in close touch with the key characters in the US. His email address begins “IWANTTOKNOW”. Yet, perversely, he says, “I detest the topic, to be quite honest. It’s wrecked my life. My businesses have been ruined, too, because I lose focus the more I've got into it. Now my daughter is an experiencer as well, and she doesn't want to be. My wife also hates the subject passionately and thinks I’m crazy to be involved, and yet, she’s had sightings with me. I don’t believe for a second we’re going to get disclosure. I just cannot see it happening.”
There are many ways to interpret these two men’s stories. Pembrokeshire-based GP Daniel Weaver has worked in mental health, especially drug-related, and takes all experiencers’ accounts seriously and fully believes most of them. He tells me he grew up around UFO stories (what is it about Wales?), and although he wouldn’t describe himself as an experiencer, he too has “seen things”. “There was more than one occasion on the coastal path when I saw some lights behaving oddly in the sky. I was like, as a scientist, that’s interesting. But I can imagine, certain personality types might be led into some quite challenging, quite toxic online spaces. Somebody could be quite vulnerable and disclose something that’s happened that has scared them, and then be hit by a wall of hostility.”
He also points out – reluctantly, it feels – that there is sometimes an overlap with drug effects and that prescription medications can also be a part of the explanation for some people. “The brain can struggle to make sense of normal stimuli,” he says. There is also a particular tendency in the UFO-sphere to promise that there’s some major disclosure event on the horizon, then move the goalposts when it doesn’t happen – an apposite observation, possibly, with Congressman Burchett’s “holy crap” prediction. Another of Unhidden’s team is Professor Gabriel de la Torre, a clinical neuropsychologist and associate professor of psychology at the University of Cadiz. Apart from one mass sighting of “something” in Cadiz, Dr de la Torre is not a UFO experiencer. But he suggests that some people might have “a special configuration of their consciousness” that makes them more prone to UAP encounters, and after an early event, are “differently sensitised”. “I also think it’s more complex than just spacecraft with aliens sitting in them. I believe we are talking about a new or different physics, new dimensions, a different level of information. Maybe the experiencers are going to be the most prepared because they have been exposed to the phenomena already.”
Next, I meet Dr Martin Abbas, a 51-year-old GP in a large practice in Swiss Cottage, London. Dr Abbas began to study UAPs by an unusual route. His wife died when he was 37, and he became interested in life after death, reincarnation and connected consciousness more than an average family doctor might. It happens that UAPs are a big topic in his native Yorkshire – especially near the sensitive military installations on the North Sea coast. Now he likes to go UFO hunting in that area and has seen ‘a few interesting things’ without saying outright that they must be from outer space because, as he says, he just doesn’t know. Abbas has specialised in studying descriptions of curious burns and marks, as well as a range of connective tissue injuries that experiencers frequently report. What do Martin Abbas’s medical colleagues make of his interest in UFOs? “They know I go and look for UAPs on my holidays and that I take the kids. Initially, it was, ‘you must be kidding’ and jokes about tinfoil hats. But with the Congressional hearings, the documentaries and so on, now colleagues want to know more.”
So could we be heading for an apocalyptic, species-changing ontological shock in the coming months? Or is it more likely that those who ‘want to believe’, will be vindicated and societal chaos ensue. The most telling conversation I have had on the subject was last year, at the Silicon Valley headquarters of SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Its CEO, a 70-year-old scientist, Bill Diamond, is one of the world’s few professional alien hunters, and he more than wants to believe. He dreams of the press conference at which he will announce that SETI has received an irrefutably “engineered” signal from a non-human intelligence.
There’s only one problem with SETI. In 40-plus years, they haven’t heard a peep. Nada, even when all their firepower has been hugely increased recently, thanks to huge donations from tech billionaires. It’s a certainty, he says, that there are other species of being in the universe. And it’s very likely that we’ll have a sign of life, maybe a signal, maybe a trace of a bacterium, by, say, 2030. But flying saucers? Diamond is sceptical. Very. “A species advanced enough to travel to Earth but accidentally get ‘observed’ and detected by Earthlings? Come-on. Pure fantasy. Crashing in our deserts after travelling between stars? That’s laughable.” To his mind, the major problem with the entire UFO/UAP narrative is that it just doesn’t add up. None of it makes any sense. “Interstellar distances are so incredibly large that any civilisation that could send spacecraft to Earth would have technologies so advanced as to be unimaginable to us. Like a cellphone to a chimpanzee. Even at fractional light speed, or ‘warp’ speed (likely not possible), would require hundreds or thousands of generations of any kind of biological life form aboard a spacecraft to travel between the stars.” “And if some civilisation has learned how to fold space and time, or somehow warp the fabric of space time to travel to Earth, it’s hard to imagine they would simply present themselves as small craft darting about our airspace.”
